When we design our video sharing site we consider how our viewers will find the video content that they want to view. We also consider how the producers publishing their videos want their videos to be displayed.
There are several things we can consider when we are thinking of the experience of these users. These range from the very basic process of deciding what additional data you want your publishers to upload together with their videos to more complex ways of categorising, presenting and linking other content to your video content.
Deciding what metadata to ask your video uploaders to fill out when you are designing your self-hosting site. These pieces of information that go with your video will include things like Title, Short Descripton, Category, Tags, Full Description, Film-maker, Still Image, Date Produced. This information about the video is called Metadata. The collection of infomation you ask for is called a Metadata schema.
At the planning stage it is tempting to ask your uploaders to fill out a very complete set of metadata. After all this data attract viewers to your videos especially via search engines.
However, there is a danger that an uploader faced with too many form fields to fill out is overwhelmed and only fillout the bare minimum of information. We can compare the simplicity of the imformation that YouTube requests when compated to archive.org.
Screenshot of Archive.org vs YouTube
Catgories: Categorisation is structured way of dividing up the contents of your website into different sections. Most website CMS have options to do this in a flexible way. You can categorise by content type creating different ones for Video | Audio | Text | images. Or you may want to create categories for
Tags: Tagging is a more flexible way of providing a s
Websites like YouTube or Vimeo rely on tagging rather categorisation than as a flexible and low maintenence way for a large number of users to describe their work.
This is key to a video sharing site with social aims. There may be additional campaign material, petitions, pdf resource, toolkits for action etc.
Your videos may be an attractive and emotive way to draw people into this less easily accessible content. You may want to make it easy for people to donate. You can work with the layout of and functionality of your site to form a strategry about how best to do that. Here are some ideas and screenshots to get you started.
There are many other ways to allow easy searching and creative presentation of your videos and associate data on the web. The best way to get inspiration for what you create is to spend some time researching what other collectives and projects have created and make a note of the techniques you find most effective. Here are a few of our favorites.
Playlists of videos: Screenshot from Kaltura or JW player playlist compare to YouTube channels, playlists
Video slideshows: Slideshows may automatically slide to reveal new videos or
Profiles / Project pages: You can curated view of several different videos from a particular producers or grouped around a theme as well as associated articles and resources linked to the film.
Tiling video thumbnail images: This may include techniques to display play buttons metadata,
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